Main Page
The Enigma Machine The Enigma machine was made by a German inventor at the end of World War 1. It consisted of 29 keys(the standard 26 letter, ä, ö and ü) and is designed in a way where the letter a is not represented by a on the keyboard, b is not b on the keyboard and so on. The machine was used in World War II to great effect, confusing Allied cryptologists and almost giving the Germans victory. In the end, Enigma's secret was revealed after the Allies captured an Enigma machine on a German U-boat. From then on, Enigma was useless against the Allies. The Enigma machine is a electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine which consists of an electrical pathway, some rotors, a stepping, a turnover, an entry wheel, a reflector, a plugboard and some other accessories. The Enigma machine mixes up messages written by operators using a system (letter substitution). In order to decrypt the secret messages, we would need to know the correct settings of the wheels of the Enigma machine. This Enigma machine was an invention created by the German engineer, Arthur Scherbius when World War I ended. Crypto is important as it helps us to conceal messages that are not supposed to be known by others except for the designated person. The Enigma machine was adopted by the German Navy in 1926, the Army in 1928, and the Air Force in 1935. It was also used by government departments. From then until 1939, successive refinements were introduced, with more detailed changes in operating produce until 1945. The following description summarizes its main features. The Enigma looks roughly like a typewriter, but it is much more complex, with fully 17,576 ring settings for each of 60 possible wheel orders—and that is just to set it up for use. The Enigma was used solely to encipher and decipher messages. In its standard form it could not type a message out, let alone transmit or receive it. From the cipher operator's point of view, it consisted of first a keyboard of 26 letters in the pattern of the normal German typewriter, with no keys for numerals or punctuation. It's measured about 13.5" x 11" x 6", and weighed about 26 lbs. Photos and videos are a great way to add visuals to your wiki. Find videos about your topic by exploring Wikia's Video Library. The Enigma machine was a simple cipher machine with several components: a plug board, a light board, a keyboard, a set of rotors, and a reflector (half rotor). which looked a lot like a typewriter. In order to decrypt a message, the receiver must have the encrypted message and know which rotors were used, connections on plug board and the initial settings of the rotors. To decrypt the message, receiver will have up the machine identically to the way the sender had initially had it and would type in the encrypted message. For a person to see the message, the person encoding it and the person decoding it have to have the same settings on their respective enigma machines. The person encoding the message will type an indicator which will then be encoded using the machine, and he uses that as the new rotor settings. The person who receives the message will type the encrypted indicator into the machine when the rotor is at the initial settings, and the decrypted indicator is seen, so the receiver then changes the rotor settings and types the message to be decoded. cryptography is essential in everyday life. When you buy from a site such as amazon you are relying upon public key cryptography to keep your credit card details safe. When your operating software automatically updates over the internet it too will use a public key algorithm to check that the update it is about to install was really published by the right people, and not by someone trying to get into your computer. Without cryptography cash machines would not be possible, as the machines would not be able to reliably communicate with the bank computers. Without cryptography, even the idea of electronic voting would not be possible (though they are making a mess of the new systems in the US). Cryptographic ideas can also be used in making message easier to decode – without these ideas we would not have error checking capabilities on communications lines, and the internet would run much more slowly. We would not be able to reduce redundancy in a message and hence compress it, thus negating popular archival programs such as ‘zip’. All of these ideas, making messages compact, error resistant, secure (or all of the above) are related to cryptography. Without cryptographic ideas, you would not be able to read this website. Category:Browse